For the gender neutral debate I can add that Sweden has recently introduced the gender neutral pronoun hen to be used instead of han (he) and hon (she). It's gotten a whole lot of press recently, but the word has been around as a suggestion for a while.

hen! i'm calling everyone a hen. 'cause you's my widdle chickens! (that's the ever-popular language of baby talk, which i've been putting a lot of effort into mastering since i started spending my afternoons at home with my cat.)

_________________"rise from the ashes of douchebaggery like a fancy vegan phoenix" - amandabear"I'm pretty sure the moral of this story is: fork pants." - cq

hen! i'm calling everyone a hen. 'cause you's my widdle chickens! (that's the ever-popular language of baby talk, which i've been putting a lot of effort into mastering since i started spending my afternoons at home with my cat.)

Yep. Extra fun for English speakers (Swedish is full of words that do not mean what they sound like to you. Another example bra = good). I'm guessing it might come from the Finnish hän, though. Naturally gender neutral and is what Finns have been using for he/she all along.

hen! i'm calling everyone a hen. 'cause you's my widdle chickens! (that's the ever-popular language of baby talk, which i've been putting a lot of effort into mastering since i started spending my afternoons at home with my cat.)

Yep. Extra fun for English speakers (Swedish is full of words that do not mean what they sound like to you. Another example bra = good). I'm guessing it might come from the Finnish hän, though. Naturally gender neutral and is what Finns have been using for he/she all along.

Or maybe not. I might well be overthinking it just because I'm familiar with Finnish. The difference between the words he and she in Swedish is a vowel so it makes sense to use a third vowel to create a new pronoun. E is a common vowel and is used in the Swedish words for it (den/det) but not for he/she (han/hon).

(I had lunch with my sister; she is a very religious person and always tells me about the worships she is going to; that always makes me giggle, because the french sentence saying "I'm attending the worship" sound just like "I'm going occult")...pfffrrrt uhuhuh

Ahaha! A friend of my family has this story: during his military service, he requested time off on Saturdays "pour aller au culte". His superior, probably not very familiar with protestantism, didn't know the word and thought he said "pour aller au cul." He thought it was a bit of a daring request, and a strange way to put it, but hey, when nature calls...

Coffee drinking Finns unite! I did point out to people at work on the sixth that it was Finland's independence day (and St Nicholas Day)... I love spinach pancakes, but don't really use a recipe. I just dump a bunch of (thawed frozen) chopped spinach into savoury pancake batter. And I obviously don't speak Finnish...

Coffee drinking Finns unite! I did point out to people at work on the sixth that it was Finland's independence day (and St Nicholas Day)... I love spinach pancakes, but don't really use a recipe. I just dump a bunch of (thawed frozen) chopped spinach into savoury pancake batter. And I obviously don't speak Finnish...

Oh cool and it's also indepedence day in Spain! (St Nicholas as a bank holiday seems like the perfect plan)But tell me more about these pancakes!!!! (and, is "pinaattiohukaiset " the word that is referring to them?)

[we also use the word "cultos" for religous services- but mostly because evangelicals/protestants wanted a word that was different from catholic mass, "missa". i also find it kind of funny.]

Same in french: "culte" vs "messe" (the catholics being a majority we barely ever hear "culte");

aelle wrote:

Ahaha! A friend of my family has this story: during his military service, he requested time off on Saturdays "pour aller au culte". His superior, probably not very familiar with protestantism, didn't know the word and thought he said "pour aller au cul." He thought it was a bit of a daring request, and a strange way to put it, but hey, when nature calls...

But tell me more about these pancakes!!!! (and, is "pinaattiohukaiset " the word that is referring to them?)

It is in Finnish. They're savoury, green, and small (I think Americans call pancakes that size silver dollar pancakes). Typically they're eaten with lingonberry jam. I don't really know what else to say about them. Except that spinach pancakes, boiled potatoes, bechamel, and lingonberry jam was one of my favourite meals as a child. I only make them occasionally now and I'm always sad that I don't have a pancake pan like my mother's to make them into the perfectly circular little pancakes I remember.

Do you know the comic Scandinavia and the World? You probably speak "Scandinavian" too. That's the language Norwegians and Danes tend to adopt when talking to stupid Swedes (but maybe you just switch to Swedish?). I'm really surprised at how badly many Swedes understand their neighbours. Then again, I do really well with different dialects of Swedish, too. And people think it's weird that I distinguish between Farsi and Arabic when I hear it despite not speaking either language. I don't think they sound alike at all!

actually, I'm sort of embarrassed when speaking swedish, but I'm pretty okay at it. And most of my swedish friends live in Helsingborg or Malmö, which makes them decent at understanding danish!

But tell me more about these pancakes!!!! (and, is "pinaattiohukaiset " the word that is referring to them?)

Like fruitbat said, they're just savoury pancakes with fresh or frozen chopped spinach. It was my favourite school lunch when I was a kid, always served with apple lingonberry salad. (We have free school lunches here in Finland from first grade to high school.)